**Resident Evil: The Global Pandemic We Actually Asked For** In a twist that would make even the most jaded virologist choke on their coffee, the phrase “resident evil” has evolved from B-grade zombie fantasy to an uncomfortably accurate job description for roughly 98% of the world’s political class. While Capcom’s fictional Umbrella Corporation merely destroyed…
GENEVA—The phrase “spitting image” used to be quaint, the sort of thing British grandmothers muttered while pinching a child’s cheek and declaring him the exact replica of some long-dead sea captain. Today, the expression has gone global, industrial-grade, and—because nothing good ever stays local—weaponised. From Lagos to Lausanne, the human face is now a mass-produced…
Mango Nightclub: The Tropical Fever Dream the World Refuses to Shake By the time the sun rises in one time zone, it’s already setting in another, and somewhere between the two—usually at 3:17 a.m. local—Mango Nightclub is just hitting its stride. To the uninitiated, it sounds like a pop-up bar in Phuket or a pop…
Australia 282-8, India 283-5 – the scorecard reads like an accountant’s ledger that accidentally got possessed by Bollywood. In the end the Women in Blue chased down the highest target in their history, and an entire planet of insomniacs from Perth to Patiala updated their group-chat status with the same three-word eulogy: “Well, that happened.”…
Steve Netflix Is Not a Man—He’s a Metaphor with a Broadband Addiction By our jaded correspondent in the Hotel Bar That Never Closes, Geneva The planet woke up last Monday to discover that “Steve Netflix” was trending in 47 languages, three of which are spoken only by algorithmically generated customer-service avatars. Within hours, #SteveNetflix outranked…
The Unlikely Diplomat: How Jeremy Newmark’s Quiet Ambition is Rewriting the Rules of Global Influence Jeremy Newmark is not the sort of man who gets invited to Davos, yet if you follow the faint scent of compromise and caffeine along the corridors of Brussels, London and—oddly—Doha, you will eventually bump into him. Newmark, former chair…
Death and taxes, the old joke goes, are the only two things you can’t dodge—unless you’re very rich, in which case you hire people whose entire job is to teach you the Macarena around both. Enter inheritance tax, the world’s most awkward after-party: the moment the music stops, the lights come up, and the state…
Chicago’s “Affordable” Housing Experiment: A Global Parable, Now with Deep-Dish Irony by D. Lockhart, Senior Cynic-at-Large The first thing you learn covering housing crises from Lagos to Lisbon is that the word “affordable” is multilingual: in Chicago it currently translates as “only moderately soul-crushing,” while in Mumbai it means “a bunk bed you can sub-sublet…
Jayden Federline: The Unlikely Geopolitical Barometer of Our Distracted Age By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand, slightly mildewed theatre of global affairs—where currencies convulse, glaciers defect southward, and diplomats pretend to read the footnotes—there now appears, stage left, a seventeen-year-old guitarist named Jayden Federline. He is the second son of Britney Spears and…
iOS 26: A Global Soft-Power Coup in 6.1 Inches By Dave’s Locker’s Bureau of Late-Stage Capitalism Correspondence GENEVA — While the United Nations was busy drafting yet another sternly-worded letter about somewhere being on fire, Apple quietly dropped iOS 26 last week, instantly redrawing the planet’s cultural map faster than you can say “non-binding resolution.”…
LIVERPOOL, England — In a city where everyone claims to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day and half the population swears it voted for Liverpool in the Brexit referendum it actually lost, the 244th Merseyside derby unfolded last Sunday like a ritual blood-letting for the global streaming classes. A four-nil demolition by Liverpool over Everton…
d4vd’s “Update”: A Casual Memo from the End of the World By “International” Dave’s Correspondent, currently hiding in a Lisbon café that still accepts cash Lisbon – If you’ve been doom-scrolling between the COP28 hangover, the slow-motion TikTok ban kabuki in Washington, and whatever fresh horror is trending in the group chat, you may have…
